You choose a perfume, you apply it, and you let it live and breathe on your skin – but you never, never mix and match. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Our resident maitresse de parfums begs to differ – and shares some interesting discoveries

Where does perfume come from? Why, from isolated islands, Indian grasses, and sticky beards of goats and sheep. Our resident perfume critic digs into labdanum, vetiver, and galbanum and lets us know where grows the nose.

Our poet of perfume and the curator of the brand new Center of Olfactory Art discuss why perfumes demand to be smelled and why “perfume is the only art form in which Americans are more illiterate than poetry.”

The great lie of the perfume industry is that the scents you wear are created by the designers that brand them. In fact perfumers with signature styles are behind those scents, and Elisa Gabbert gives them some overdue recognition.

Music and photographs can stir memories, but in the world of scent, only a single molecule — a single note — is needed to take us deep. In this installment of her regular column, our author waxes on how the Eighties and Nineties smelled.

Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Wave Books, 2009
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets starts with its worst sentence: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” I am suspicious of this sentence; I find …

Romanticism
April Bernard
W.W. Norton, 2009
Most of the poems in this collection, the fourth from April Bernard (whom W.S. Merwin deems “brilliant” on the flap copy, a poet of “power and ambition”) are rather lovely—and at …

Poemland
by Chelsey Minnis
Wave Books, 2008
Chelsey Minnis is something of a poet’s poet, and to certain readers her third book, Poemland, will come off as undisciplined, even ridiculous. But to readers who want to be in …

State of the Union
Eds. Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder
Wave Books, 2008
There are many things I like about the new political anthology from Wave Books, State of the Union. I like its size–very manageable at just …

Quaker Guns
Caroline Knox
Wave Books, 2008
Caroline Knox is a serious goofball. In Quaker Guns, her sixth and latest book of poetry, her over-the-top whimsy pays off more often than not, sometimes with big dividends.
Though Knox’s poems …

Human Resources
Rachel Zolf
Coach House Books, 2007
Having read a little about Human Resources, I suspected I might “get” the project pretty quickly and not need or want to finish the whole thing. It combines corporate language …